


Out Loud

by juniper_and_lamplight



Series: Close Reading [5]
Category: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (TV 2016)
Genre: Books, Character Study, Families of Choice, Gen, Pararibulitis (Dirk Gently), Reading, Reading Aloud, Storytelling, audiobooks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-11
Updated: 2019-09-11
Packaged: 2020-09-30 09:17:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20444765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/juniper_and_lamplight/pseuds/juniper_and_lamplight
Summary: “Screw it. Sometimes I just want someone to tell me a story.”





	Out Loud

_ **Now** _

She feels guilty about it at first, though not because of the stealing. She has zero guilt about pocketing paperbacks at truck stops or hastily downloading pirated audiobooks every time they find free wi-fi. It’s the fact that she does it purely for herself. Stealing things she doesn’t share seems rude somehow, out of sync with the lowkey-anarchist-commune vibe they’ve got going in the Rowdy 3. The guilt isn’t powerful enough to stop her, though. She’s been a story junkie for too long to kick the habit now. And anyway, even if she didn’t feel guilty about it, she’s not sure how she’d explain it to the others—reading doesn’t seem to be a thing for the guys, and Beast doesn’t even speak English, much less read it. So Amanda ends up stealing moments as well as books. 

Moments like this one, when the van is parked along a seldom-used country highway, and everyone else is asleep. She extracts herself from the protective tangle of limbs, creeps out into the cooling night air, and lays on her back in the damp, chilly grass. She puts her earbuds in and presses “play” on her phone, and the words of _Akata Witch_ pour into her ears. 

She closes her eyes, and tries to immerse herself in the story, see it in her mind’s eye. It shouldn’t be too difficult, since the words are vivid and gripping, but there’s a small portion of her brain that can’t stop thinking about how lucky the characters are to have someone teaching them magic, to have a clearly defined quest instead of a vague charge to repair a broken reality. Memories of Wakti flicker around the edges of her consciousness, and the wand in her jacket pocket presses against her ribs, warm from her body heat and from its own tantalizing, inexplicable power. Now’s not the time for experimentation, though. Now is the time to listen. With a well-practiced wrench of will, she refocuses on the story, lets it pick her up and carry her away. She’s so caught up, in fact, that when the recording ends and she opens her eyes again, it’s a shock to see the other five members of the Rowdy 3 staring back at her. 

“Shit!” She sits up and holds out her hands, waiting for the adrenaline-charged crackling of her nervous system to coalesce into an attack, but her hands remain steady. Her heart rate slows, and Gripps and Cross reach out to take her extended hands, pulling her up. Beast tackles her with a blanket just as Vogel asks, “What were you doing on the ground, boss?” 

She feels the throb of guilt again, but pushes it down. “I was...listening.”

“Listening for what?” Gripps asks, eyes darting around in search of imminent threats. 

Amanda pulls the blanket tighter around her shoulders—she hadn’t realized how cold she’d gotten. “I wasn’t listening for something, I was listening to something. A book. I know it’s not very punk, but screw it. Sometimes I just want someone to tell me a story.”

There’s a beat of silence as they take this in, and then Martin says, “You want stories, drummer?” He glances around at his compatriots, a lupine grin spreading across his face. “We got stories.”

* * *

_ **Then** _

Her earliest memories were of Todd reading to her. The sound of his reedy, pre-adolescent voice narrating picture books about mischievous zoo gorillas, hillsides covered in cats, or farm-animal punk bands was hard-wired into her baby brain, so that later—even after his voice changed, even after all the lies and betrayal—his voice still triggered instinctive feelings of _safe_ and _home_ and _loved._ The truth always came crashing in afterward, but the instinct remained.

In retrospect, it was clear that the reading stopped when the lies began. Todd had read with her throughout her childhood: the Harry Potter books, of course (because she had to know what all the kids at school were talking about); A Series of Unfortunate Events (which aligned much more closely with her worldview); _Holes_ (they’d read that one twice); His Dark Materials (a mutual favorite, due to the combination of shape-shifting animals and anti-establishment themes); and, at Todd’s insistence, Lord of the Rings (but only to a point—Todd got huffy when she told him that his Frodo voice sucked, so they stopped after _Fellowship_ and she finished the trilogy on her own, gleefully skimming over all the boring landscape descriptions). Books kept them together throughout the sniping and slap-fights of siblinghood, and their reading sessions provided an invisible scaffolding to her young life.

All of which made it that much harder when the scaffolding collapsed. When Todd went away to college, he promised that he’d visit on weekends, that they keep up reading just like they always had. And at first, he kept his word. But then, bit by bit, his visits dropped off. He got caught up in his band and his own selfish garbage, she was left with silent, solo reading. The stories were still good, but it wasn’t the same. Without someone reading to her, the words felt trapped inside her head, unspoken and unshared.

* * *

_ **Now** _

The Rowdies are nothing if not supportive of their adopted leader, and so they begin a new family tradition: whenever one of them hollers “STORYTIME!”, they all bang their fists against the van’s roof until someone starts talking. 

At first, the guys regale Amanda and Beast with tales of their daring exploits. These are mostly of the mayhem-brawls-and-arson variety, with a few not-so-violent escapades mixed in, like the time they went cliff-jumping at a waterfall in Arizona, or when they gate-crashed Coachella to fuck with rich glampers. None of them ever mentions Blackwing, or their lives before they were held there—at least not directly.

It’s only when the storytelling segues into speculation and straight-up fiction that Amanda starts to get glimpses. Vogel’s stories are the most obvious—the one about a captive goblin boy being rescued and raised by wolves is a blatant, heart-wrenching allegory if ever she’s heard one. The other guys are more oblique in the hints they drop: Cross’ stories are terse yet evocative, with bursts of Portugese and some South Asian-souding language Amanda can’t identify; Gripps is prone to cryptic, rapid-fire fables filled with math puzzles (and, on one memorable occasion, iambic pentameter); and Martin rumbles out nonlinear episodes in an epic family saga that’s too grim and too outlandish to be true, yet too specific to be entirely made up.

Eventually, even Beast chimes in. While her speech is still unintelligible most of the time, her stories are filled with dramatic gestures, startling jump scares, and what are clearly meant to be killer punchlines, even if no one understands the jokes. (They all laugh anyway.)

On the rare occasions when she gets ahold of books that might not make the Rowdies riot (at least not any more than usual), Amanda reads out loud. Gripps adores _The Phantom Tollbooth_ even though Martin grumbles about nerdy bullshit, and they blaze through _We Sold Our Souls_ with only minimal breaks for the moments when Vogel gets too freaked out. Reading stories instead of just telling them like everyone else feels a little like cheating, but making up fiction isn’t Amanda’s strong suit, and apart from a few funny childhood anecdotes and way too many horrific hallucinations, she doesn’t have any personal stories the others don’t know. Even if she tried, she’s not sure she could spin her years of being sick and semi-homebound into a tale worth telling. It’s hard to even think about that time now that it’s been reframed by Todd’s lies and her own exhilarating Rowdy glow-up; the memories feel slippery, undefinable, like a long stretch of radio static preceding a loud, thrashing song.

* * *

_ **Then** _

It was too much, the quiet. Being alone in the house, all day every day, was bad enough without the crushing silence that surrounded her. She knew, both intellectually and from painful, personal experience, that the slightest trigger could set off an attack, and so she tried to live a triggerless life: she ate the right foods, got enough sleep, wore only comfortable clothes, and avoided most kinds of unpredictable sensory input. The silence, though—she couldn’t live with the silence. The noise was her only company, most days, and she invited it, sensory triggers be damned.

Sometimes, when she was at low ebb, she’d simply leave the TV on, like she was an anxious dog whose owner was away. Other times, if she was feeling daring, she’d allow herself to remember the raucous punk shows and noisy, drunken parties she used to go to, and then she’d get so angry that she’d have to blast hardcore and whale on the drums until she lost her grip on the drumsticks and fumbled, trembling, for her meds. But most days, she listened. She listened to audiobooks, to YouTube, to podcasts (so what if The Bright Sessions brought on an attack or two, not to mention some tears), and even to public radio if she couldn’t find anything else. She would’ve loved to listen to Todd read to her, like he’d done before either of them had pararibulitis, but he never volunteered when he visited, and she couldn’t make herself ask, not on top of everything else he did for her. Once, she tried reading out loud to herself, but that felt even lonelier than the silence she was trying to fill.

So she listened to other voices, learned an incredible amount of random information, and absorbed stories about more people and places than she would ever experience in-person. The constant sound of human voices was a reassurance that she was still real, still a human herself, even if the things those voices spoke about—adventure, magic, travel, friendship—were beyond her grasp.

* * *

_ **Now** _

They’re driving down a long, potholed stretch of highway in Nebraska when she wonders, out loud, what Wakti Wapnasi might be doing right now. 

There’s a pause, as if the others are scenting the air, trying to get a read on the emotions behind her words, and then suddenly all five of them start shouting over each other in their attempts to describe Wakti’s continued magical feats in Wendimoor. When it starts getting too cacophonous, Gripps makes everyone take turns, but the story still involves frequent loud interjections (Beast), as well as several spaceships (Vogel), and at least one moose (Cross). Amanda can’t imagine Wakti actually putting up with any of their inventions, but she also can’t stop smiling, soothed by the unruly voices surrounding her. 

The comforting cocoon cracks open, however, when Martin inhales sharply, his spine straightening and nostrils flaring. He’s sensed something, and Amanda’s adrenaline spikes as Cross, Gripps, and Vogel fall abruptly silent, straining their own senses toward— 

“What is it?” she whispers, wishing she could figure out the magic that would let her share in their abilities. 

“Smells like…” Martin trails off, gripping the steering wheel and gritting his teeth. The other guys tense up as well, reaching for the nearest weapons to hand. There’s only one thing that scares the Rowdy 3 this much.

“Blackwing?!” Amanda hisses, her guts twisting and her hand already reaching for the wand in her jacket. “Why the fuck are you still driving towards it?”

“Done runnin’,” Martin growls. “And if there’s only one of them...I’ll take those odds.”

Sure enough, it’s a lone figure that looms out of the dusky roadside shadows. To Amanda’s relief, the person isn’t sporting the riot-gear-and-guns look of a Blackwing soldier. Instead, they appear to be half-dressed in a filthy, ripped, bloodstained jumpsuit. A jumpsuit very similar to the ones the guys had been wearing when Amanda broke them out.

The van screeches to a halt as it pulls up alongside the person, and Martin stares at them through the open window. The person stares back, head cocked to one side. Some kind of understanding seems to pass between them, because as soon as the figure says, “Lemme in, I need a ride,” Martin nods to Cross, who throws open the van’s back door. The person clambers aboard, and Amanda tries not to flinch—she’s never smelled anything so rank, not even after living in a van with four dudes and a cave girl from fairyland. If this is what psychic energy smells like, she’s glad she’s never been able to sense it before.

“Did you...escape?” Amanda’s not sure what else to ask in this situation.

“Sorta.” The person shrugs, their matted hair bobbing with motion. “They’re not coming after me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“That’s, um, good to know, definitely don’t want them coming after us. But I meant more like...are you okay?”

“Do I gotta talk about feelings to ride with you?”

“No, of course not, but—” 

“Okay, so where are we going?”

“Right now? Right now we’re going that way,” Gripps interjects, pointing to the road ahead.

“Yeah, me too,” says the person. And apparently that’s enough for Martin, who puts the van back in drive, peeling away from gravel shoulder and accelerating back onto the road.

As Amanda crawls into the back to find some less-disgusting clothes for their new passenger, Vogel turns to them and announces, “We’re telling Wendimoor stories tonight!” 

The passenger is completely unfazed. “Yeah, I been there. It wasn’t so great.” Their scowly, resentful eyes dart toward the faceless moon, just barely visible through the windshield, and Amanda feels certain that the passenger is telling the truth. She knows better than most that travel between Blackwing and Wendimoor was possible. 

“You got any stories?” Vogel prods. “Maybe with Martians or furry monsters?”

“Bogles an’ borgabush!” shouts Beast, who’s already scuttled up close to sniff the newcomer.

“I don’t know about any of that,” the person says. “But if you’re telling stories...do you know the one about the stupid elephant?” When no one responds, the person continues, eyes suddenly bright and fervent. “See, the elephant thought his best friend was gone for good, but he was wrong. She was always gonna find him again. When the time was right, she’d find him.”

Amanda’s heart twists at the wistfulness in the stranger’s voice, but she doesn’t pry. She just hands over a spare jacket and leans in, curious to hear the rest of the story unfold.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Any kudos or comments will be cherished, and feel free to find me on Tumblr to yell about DGHDA and the reading habits of fictional people.  
* * *  
The internet tells me that Zak Santiago (who plays Cross) speaks Portugese and that his parents are from Bangladesh, hence the Bengali that Amanda can’t identify.
> 
> Works and authors referenced:  
-_Akata Witch_, Nnedi Okorafor, narrated by Yetide Badaki  
-_Goodnight Gorilla_, Peggy Rathman  
-_Millions of Cats_, Wanda Gág  
-_Punk Farm,_ Jarrett J. Krosoczka (published in 2005, well after Amanda’s toddler years, but it was too perfect not to include)  
-Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling  
-A Series of Unfortunate Events, Lemony Snicket  
-_Holes_, Louis Sachar  
-His Dark Materials trilogy, Philip Pullman  
-Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien  
-_The Phantom Tollbooth_, Norton Juster  
-_We Sold Our Souls_, Grady Hendrix  
-_The Bright Sessions_, Lauren Shippen, et al.  
-_My New Friend Is So Fun!_, Mo Willems (first referenced in Bart’s chapter)__


End file.
